Written eight years before the widely acclaimed Baltasar and Blimunda, and finally available in the United States, this first novel from Nobel Prize winner José Saramago is a story of self-discovery set against the last years of António Salazar's dictatorship in Portugal. A struggling portrait artist, identifying himself only as H., experiences a political awakening after he is commissioned to paint an influential industrialist, and discovers that his true creative gift is writing. The juxtaposition of a passionate love story and the crisis of a nation foreshadows themes running through all of Saramago's major works.

"H. begins to emerge from his stagnancy when he discovers that writing—about his travels in Italy, at first—unlocks creative energies that painting cannot. With this realization comes the promise of real romance but also, in the desperate last days of the Salazar autocracy, certain responsibilities. All fiction is biography, Saramago reminds us, and it is indeed tempting to understand H.'s awakening as a depiction of Saramago's own. But this is Saramago, after all, so even a portrait of the artist as a young man hints at the profound and the universal."—Booklist